You goose! Have a long hard think about the word "asian", and its meaning....
Re:Genuine question about perl vs ruby
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 1
Disclaimer - I'm no Perl expert, each time I look at an example, the syntax makes my head hurt, and I leave it be.
Why would you look at Ruby? Well for me the answer was Rails. I have been able to start developing innovative web apps (not toy on-line stores) very quickly. This is in part thanks to Ruby's ease of use, and partly because Ruby and Rails have two very, very, good books available for them from the Pragmatic Programmers.
Ruby is also fun to program. Really. It's not just hype. The syntax is nearly syntax free. To this day, after 10 years of professional C programming, I still have to look up how to write the definition of a function type. With Ruby, everything is much more intuitive. You do what seems logical, and it generally does what you want.
RubyGems make getting libs the easiest thing in the world. gem install some_module_name. There, done. No./configure, make, sudo make install. No fighting against dependencies.
The downside of Ruby? Its speed. We can hope that one of these days someone gets around to writing a faster implementation, but until that day, Ruby is not for writing the successor to Gears of War... But then again, how many of us are writing the equivalent of the successor to Gears of War? Not too many. Most of us just want to write command line utils, web apps, that kind of stuff. With today's computers, Ruby's performance is more than adequate for all but the most CPU-intensive tasks....
But is that really true? I mean, if someone (a client, a supplier) sends you a Word document, generally you don't care about the pretty formatting (unless you are one of the unlucky few working in a page layout job). If you can read the information in the document, that is good enough. Same thing for Excel spreadsheets, and Powerpoint presentations. Note that I personally do not accept any Office documents from third-parties that contain macros. they are just too dangerous to allow onto my system.
And as for sending documents, don't. Send PDFs. They are harder to modify for nefarious purposes, they give a guaranteed layout on the receiving computer, and they are platform agnostic.
Yup, although I'd be willing to bet that if that really is the name of the new product, it would be "Illuminus", not "Illuminous". At least then it would be a noun....
Which is of course absolute bollocks as an argument. If I decide that I want to to make a hand crafted copy of the latest Harry Potter book, by creating an illuminated manuscript on vellum, bound in leather, and then the book's publisher comes into my living room and sees it, I'm willing to bet that they aren't going to try and sue me.
The flaw in the anology is that people can't really make their own copies of books. A book is aphysical object that takes money to make. Obviously I can't insist that someone give me other copies in other formats, that cost them money to make, for free.
CDs, DVDs etc on the otherhand, I can copy for a negligeable cost. That's what bugs the RIAA.
On a slightly different topic, I have no problem with DRM, but I think it would be a very good idea if DRM schemes removed themselves from your purchases after say 3 years. After 3 years, music is pretty much back-catalogue anyway. Those that want it are more in the "collector" kind of mentality - thay are probably going to want the "authentic experience", Album artwork, CD and all.
Sorry, I didn't explain myself clearly enough. I was thinking specifically of another "illlegal" operation that operates along the same lines as AllOfMP3. So basically, they just don't care that they are in breach of contract. But imagine that you are an established artist. These sites have enough exposure that your music will still hit a wide market, especially if you are still being referenced by radio stations. They are also giving you a lot more money than your record label. They really could _become_ your record label. They only question is how would artists approached by such a site (and by approached, I mean 'be on the receiving end of a cheque')?
what would happen if someone set up a site, a bit like The Pirate Bay, or AllOfMP3, but with the big difference that they took the trouble to track down the artists who's work they sold, and gave them half the profits. What would the artists do? Reject the money? Ditch their RIAA contract?
Ouch. I do believe that has got to be the most comprehensive smackdown that I have ever read on/. Nice work Moraelin, but stop beating up on the handicapped kid, it's not nice! (jolly amusing though!)
need to start making some noise about anti-competitive practices. They have provided platforms capable of running Windows, and Microsoft is actively taking steps to prevent them from being able to run Windows. Not for technical reasons - after all, a few hundred bucks extra gives you the right, but for pure commercial motives.
Microsoft isn't stupid. MacOSX Intel version provides for the first time in many a year a true competitor on the home desktop. [rant]Why the *&#! can't Edgy Eft successfully execute half the packages available through Synapse! And they want normal home users that don't even know what a command line prompt is to use it! I think not! [/rant]
Anyway, as I was saying, anyone running MacOSX with Windows in a virtualised environment is very likely going to use that Windows environment less and less. I think that possibility scares Microsoft a whole lot - hence the change to the EULA
This is not a bad solution, but just one step further, and you can nail most spam. Stick a dummy spam address (the equivalent of your ck@example.com - my apologies to example.com which is now in the process of getting heavily spammed....) in hidden text somewhere on the page. This is your honeypot. Any harvester that hits your page is going to find and use this address, identifying the computer that has been p0wned. This computer's address is now added to an email blacklist (except in the case where the mail already exists in a user's whitelist). All spam arriving at the true address (which was also easily available and useable on the html page) is likely to also send spam to the honeypot address, thereby allowing us to identify the sender as a spammer, and we kill the mail...
For me, it cuts spam down to a manageable level (about 10% of all emails).
Sadly, stopping emissions, even if we could go cold turkey and permanenly drop emissions by 50% tomorrow, won't be enough to stop a major temperature rise over the next 100 years or so, due to pollutants that are already in the atmosphere. Of course, with rising temperatures, we have more storms, floods and other natural disasters, which in turn drains global GDP, making investment in clean technologies ever more difficult.
This solution provides a neat circuit-breaker. It give us the possibility of avoiding the worst of the global warming that we have already set in motion. Quite frankly, I would love it for this type of project to be given the greenlight tomorrow. Operations should be able to start in about (plucks figure from the air) 10 years if my understanding of the technologies involved and their current state is correct. That would have the shield entirely in place in about 35 years, just when global warming is really going to be starting to make itself felt.
We have to do something, the status quo, and even conservation efforts are no longer going to be enough to save the day - bring on the super-engineering projects I say....
I think he was talking about the cost in terms of the carbon budget - ie we would generate more pollution, and hence warming, by launching all those rockets than we would decrease the warming through the effects of the heat shield. But if you power the sucker by hydroelectric, or some other "clean" energy source, disaster could be averted.
Nice idea. It's good to know that we have options if needs be....
Yup, you're missing the point.
A change from 10.4 to 10.5 is a major version release, hence the name change from Tiger to Leopard. It's just that Apple wan't to keep the 10, so that they can justify the X at the and of MacOSX. And why keep the X? Because it's traditional that Unixy operating systems have it in the name (think Unix, Linux, NeXt etc etc etc)
So what you are thinking of as minor point releases are actually the changes from say 10.4.7 to 10.4.8. And as you would expect, they are free....
See other posts for a list of the new features that have been added in this next release - suffice it to say that some of these new features, such as TimeMachine, are groundbreaking, and well justify the price of an upgrade...
Of course, if you don't agree, don't upgrade. It's a free market.
Getting support on a product you are not using makes no sense, so that part of your argument is nonsensical.
Of course it's nonsensical. That's how we know that the value (the real value, the stuff that you can actually use) is in the software, not in the support. It's not me trying to suggest that support is intrinsically valuable, it's you...
I fully understand that there are companies/organisations with procurement policies that insist on support contracts. But all that tells us is that large companies tend to have ignorant fools writing their procurement policies. News at 11....
The problem is that out-of-the-box, OS X does not run on non-Apple hardware. Apple have implemented a copy-protection system, and you don't have the right to circumvent that, thanks to the DMCA and it's European equivalents... Some may wish to argue that they can make the changes under the interoperability clauses of the DMCA, but it would take a brave individual to try.
Anyway, Apple really doesn't care. If a handful of people want to run the risk of obtaining a key by probably illegal means, and using it to install OS X on their Dell, where it won't have timely updates, drivers risk not working, etc etc etc, then Apple really isn't going to care. It's not a threat to their income stream.
Think of it this way - if someone gives you Fedora without support, you can probably still do what you needed to do. If someone gives you Redhat Support, without actually giving you Redhat, you can't do anything except talk to the Support Line all day. That's what I meant by the value really being in the software.
As for development, the thing is that Oracle can cheat. Do bugfixes, writing test cases for each bug fixed as you go. Do this for two years, then go and pilfer the OSS community again a couple of years later, when you want a new release. If Oracle plays it's cards right, they will have submitted bug reports to the OSS community along the way, along with their own fixes.... A good percentage of those are going to get picked up in the official OSS code.
When the time to create a new release comes, they run the test cases to identify if known bugs have been "re-introduced". Those should be relatively quick to fix, and Oracle gets to stay relatively close to the latest stuff out there.
IMO, this is manageable, and way cheaper than doing the R&D type stuff that Redhat does for Linux.
It has always seemed relatively obvious to me that most OSS software companies are vulnerable to this type of attack mounted by a large proprietary software vendor. Take the software (which, at the end of the day is where the real value is), and offer support, but without undertaking any of the major development tasks (only do bugfixes). The OSS competitor has two choices: continue to do R&D work on the product, to keep it advancing, and accepting that they can't sell support as cheaply as the "bug-fix only" proprietary vendor, or stop doing R&D themselves, so that they can be cost-competitive. Of course the disadvantage of this approach is that the product quickly falls behind proprietary offerings....
This is not going to be an easy battle for Redhat. I suspect they are going to have to find a new business model if they are to survive.
I couldn't agree more. I work in DRM, and one of my "duties" is to try and reverse engineer competitors' products to say what makes them tick, see what tricks they have used to make hackers' lives difficult etc etc etc. Most people have never tried to reverse engineer an encryption scheme. I have. I promise you that obscurity makes everyone hacker's life miserable.
To give an example - if you hand me some unobfuscated code in native binary, I will have retrieved the keys used to decrypt in less than a week. If you put some of your code in a popular VM (VMs being a popular obfuscation technique) such as Java, I have a whole series of tools freely available to me, and it won't take long to reverse engineer that either (in fact Java is easier than native byte-code). If you use a proprietary VM such as OpenTV, you're going to slow me down quite a bit. Dissassemblers/debuggers don't exist, and even the documentation for the bytecodes used by the VM are difficult to track down. To reverse engineer efficiently, you are obliged to start by writing your own debugger - and depending on your success in tracking down documentation, these may mean starting by reverse engineering the entire virtual machine. With a product like OpenTV, you can cheat a little by writing your own programs and compiling them with the easily available compilers. This makes the reverse engineering a bit simpler.
And then there is the all time pain in the butt, the custom-rolled virtual machine, designed to work in ways not normally seen in virtual machines, using screwed up addressing schemes, real-time decryption of programs etc etc etc. Worse, you have no tools, not even the compiler/assembler that goes with it. It's the ultimate security by obscurity. Your only attack is to reverse engineer the virtual machine. Worse, if the company has decided to obfuscate the virtual machine itself by another technique, you are in a world of hurt. Picking out the decrypt keys, or even just identifying the encryption algorithm used, is next to impossible. You're going to spend a good chunk of your life trying to sort this baby out.
Encryption is only as good as the security of the keys. And the keys are only as secure as the quality of obfuscation used to hide them. In other words, in most computer environments, the security _is_ the obscurity.
As an Australian living in Paris, I just took the opportunity of doing a quick straw poll of friends/coleagues to find out what they thought was the hardest English accent to understand. Stand-out winners were the Irish, with the Scottish accent following in as an easy second. Strine ('Australian' said with an Aussie accent if you can't figure out where it comes from....) follows way back with (evidently) Kiwis, South Africans, and all the other funny English accents (brogue, cockney etc etc etc).
Just to finish off, when querying them about speaking English with Indians, most consider the Indian accent to be sufficiently bad that communications are all but impossible.
What fascinates me by your unbelievably uninformative post is that apparently you don't even know many (any?) Australians, having to rely on an anecdote from a former co-worker. Good Grief!
How about posting about a subject that you know something about?
Wait, if that's true (I note that you posted as an AC...), I just had a horrible thought. We have DRM on the iTunes episodes because we are told that this stops pirating, so people pay for the episode instead. The networks tell us this is a good thing, because it means more money to pay for more shows = more content for us. But now we are being told that the money doesn't go back to the creative talent, ie presumably it goes into the oversized pockets of company execs/shareholders. Come again?!?!
Please note, I am one of the rare/.ers that actually believes DRM to be a reasonable idea. I write software for a living, and don't like the idea that others can just take my products that I have worked hard on without me getting anything in return. I even do DRM for a living just at the moment! But still, DRM is ONLY justifiable if the money made means more content (better content!) is produced.
And you of course have no idea what you are talking about.
The latest version of NeoOffice is quite simply the best Office software available on a Mac, free or otherwise. I've even got my father to install it and he now refuses to use MS Office.
Slashdot Mirror
You goose! Have a long hard think about the word "asian", and its meaning....
Disclaimer - I'm no Perl expert, each time I look at an example, the syntax makes my head hurt, and I leave it be.
./configure, make, sudo make install. No fighting against dependencies.
Why would you look at Ruby? Well for me the answer was Rails. I have been able to start developing innovative web apps (not toy on-line stores) very quickly. This is in part thanks to Ruby's ease of use, and partly because Ruby and Rails have two very, very, good books available for them from the Pragmatic Programmers.
Ruby is also fun to program. Really. It's not just hype. The syntax is nearly syntax free. To this day, after 10 years of professional C programming, I still have to look up how to write the definition of a function type. With Ruby, everything is much more intuitive. You do what seems logical, and it generally does what you want.
RubyGems make getting libs the easiest thing in the world. gem install some_module_name. There, done. No
The downside of Ruby? Its speed. We can hope that one of these days someone gets around to writing a faster implementation, but until that day, Ruby is not for writing the successor to Gears of War... But then again, how many of us are writing the equivalent of the successor to Gears of War? Not too many. Most of us just want to write command line utils, web apps, that kind of stuff. With today's computers, Ruby's performance is more than adequate for all but the most CPU-intensive tasks....
But is that really true? I mean, if someone (a client, a supplier) sends you a Word document, generally you don't care about the pretty formatting (unless you are one of the unlucky few working in a page layout job). If you can read the information in the document, that is good enough. Same thing for Excel spreadsheets, and Powerpoint presentations. Note that I personally do not accept any Office documents from third-parties that contain macros. they are just too dangerous to allow onto my system.
And as for sending documents, don't. Send PDFs. They are harder to modify for nefarious purposes, they give a guaranteed layout on the receiving computer, and they are platform agnostic.
Yup, although I'd be willing to bet that if that really is the name of the new product, it would be "Illuminus", not "Illuminous". At least then it would be a noun....
Which is of course absolute bollocks as an argument. If I decide that I want to to make a hand crafted copy of the latest Harry Potter book, by creating an illuminated manuscript on vellum, bound in leather, and then the book's publisher comes into my living room and sees it, I'm willing to bet that they aren't going to try and sue me.
The flaw in the anology is that people can't really make their own copies of books. A book is aphysical object that takes money to make. Obviously I can't insist that someone give me other copies in other formats, that cost them money to make, for free.
CDs, DVDs etc on the otherhand, I can copy for a negligeable cost. That's what bugs the RIAA.
On a slightly different topic, I have no problem with DRM, but I think it would be a very good idea if DRM schemes removed themselves from your purchases after say 3 years. After 3 years, music is pretty much back-catalogue anyway. Those that want it are more in the "collector" kind of mentality - thay are probably going to want the "authentic experience", Album artwork, CD and all.
Sorry, I didn't explain myself clearly enough. I was thinking specifically of another "illlegal" operation that operates along the same lines as AllOfMP3. So basically, they just don't care that they are in breach of contract. But imagine that you are an established artist. These sites have enough exposure that your music will still hit a wide market, especially if you are still being referenced by radio stations. They are also giving you a lot more money than your record label. They really could _become_ your record label. They only question is how would artists approached by such a site (and by approached, I mean 'be on the receiving end of a cheque')?
what would happen if someone set up a site, a bit like The Pirate Bay, or AllOfMP3, but with the big difference that they took the trouble to track down the artists who's work they sold, and gave them half the profits. What would the artists do? Reject the money? Ditch their RIAA contract?
Ouch. I do believe that has got to be the most comprehensive smackdown that I have ever read on /. Nice work Moraelin, but stop beating up on the handicapped kid, it's not nice! (jolly amusing though!)
need to start making some noise about anti-competitive practices. They have provided platforms capable of running Windows, and Microsoft is actively taking steps to prevent them from being able to run Windows. Not for technical reasons - after all, a few hundred bucks extra gives you the right, but for pure commercial motives.
Microsoft isn't stupid. MacOSX Intel version provides for the first time in many a year a true competitor on the home desktop. [rant]Why the *&#! can't Edgy Eft successfully execute half the packages available through Synapse! And they want normal home users that don't even know what a command line prompt is to use it! I think not! [/rant]
Anyway, as I was saying, anyone running MacOSX with Windows in a virtualised environment is very likely going to use that Windows environment less and less. I think that possibility scares Microsoft a whole lot - hence the change to the EULA
This is not a bad solution, but just one step further, and you can nail most spam. Stick a dummy spam address (the equivalent of your ck@example.com - my apologies to example.com which is now in the process of getting heavily spammed....) in hidden text somewhere on the page. This is your honeypot. Any harvester that hits your page is going to find and use this address, identifying the computer that has been p0wned. This computer's address is now added to an email blacklist (except in the case where the mail already exists in a user's whitelist). All spam arriving at the true address (which was also easily available and useable on the html page) is likely to also send spam to the honeypot address, thereby allowing us to identify the sender as a spammer, and we kill the mail...
For me, it cuts spam down to a manageable level (about 10% of all emails).
Sheesh! Who marked this off-topic!
1. Read the article.
2. Read the title of the post.
3. Think about it!
Troubleshooting:
If still off-topic, you may try the following solutions:
a) get a sense of humour
b) get a brain.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6300590/
http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002794.html
Maybe in the US, but the SI unit is actually the What....
Sadly, stopping emissions, even if we could go cold turkey and permanenly drop emissions by 50% tomorrow, won't be enough to stop a major temperature rise over the next 100 years or so, due to pollutants that are already in the atmosphere. Of course, with rising temperatures, we have more storms, floods and other natural disasters, which in turn drains global GDP, making investment in clean technologies ever more difficult.
This solution provides a neat circuit-breaker. It give us the possibility of avoiding the worst of the global warming that we have already set in motion. Quite frankly, I would love it for this type of project to be given the greenlight tomorrow. Operations should be able to start in about (plucks figure from the air) 10 years if my understanding of the technologies involved and their current state is correct. That would have the shield entirely in place in about 35 years, just when global warming is really going to be starting to make itself felt.
We have to do something, the status quo, and even conservation efforts are no longer going to be enough to save the day - bring on the super-engineering projects I say....
I think he was talking about the cost in terms of the carbon budget - ie we would generate more pollution, and hence warming, by launching all those rockets than we would decrease the warming through the effects of the heat shield. But if you power the sucker by hydroelectric, or some other "clean" energy source, disaster could be averted.
Nice idea. It's good to know that we have options if needs be....
Yup, you're missing the point. A change from 10.4 to 10.5 is a major version release, hence the name change from Tiger to Leopard. It's just that Apple wan't to keep the 10, so that they can justify the X at the and of MacOSX. And why keep the X? Because it's traditional that Unixy operating systems have it in the name (think Unix, Linux, NeXt etc etc etc) So what you are thinking of as minor point releases are actually the changes from say 10.4.7 to 10.4.8. And as you would expect, they are free.... See other posts for a list of the new features that have been added in this next release - suffice it to say that some of these new features, such as TimeMachine, are groundbreaking, and well justify the price of an upgrade... Of course, if you don't agree, don't upgrade. It's a free market.
Getting support on a product you are not using makes no sense, so that part of your argument is nonsensical.
Of course it's nonsensical. That's how we know that the value (the real value, the stuff that you can actually use) is in the software, not in the support. It's not me trying to suggest that support is intrinsically valuable, it's you...
I fully understand that there are companies/organisations with procurement policies that insist on support contracts. But all that tells us is that large companies tend to have ignorant fools writing their procurement policies. News at 11....
All true, but...
The problem is that out-of-the-box, OS X does not run on non-Apple hardware. Apple have implemented a copy-protection system, and you don't have the right to circumvent that, thanks to the DMCA and it's European equivalents... Some may wish to argue that they can make the changes under the interoperability clauses of the DMCA, but it would take a brave individual to try.
Anyway, Apple really doesn't care. If a handful of people want to run the risk of obtaining a key by probably illegal means, and using it to install OS X on their Dell, where it won't have timely updates, drivers risk not working, etc etc etc, then Apple really isn't going to care. It's not a threat to their income stream.
Think of it this way - if someone gives you Fedora without support, you can probably still do what you needed to do. If someone gives you Redhat Support, without actually giving you Redhat, you can't do anything except talk to the Support Line all day. That's what I meant by the value really being in the software.
As for development, the thing is that Oracle can cheat. Do bugfixes, writing test cases for each bug fixed as you go. Do this for two years, then go and pilfer the OSS community again a couple of years later, when you want a new release. If Oracle plays it's cards right, they will have submitted bug reports to the OSS community along the way, along with their own fixes.... A good percentage of those are going to get picked up in the official OSS code.
When the time to create a new release comes, they run the test cases to identify if known bugs have been "re-introduced". Those should be relatively quick to fix, and Oracle gets to stay relatively close to the latest stuff out there.
IMO, this is manageable, and way cheaper than doing the R&D type stuff that Redhat does for Linux.
It has always seemed relatively obvious to me that most OSS software companies are vulnerable to this type of attack mounted by a large proprietary software vendor. Take the software (which, at the end of the day is where the real value is), and offer support, but without undertaking any of the major development tasks (only do bugfixes). The OSS competitor has two choices: continue to do R&D work on the product, to keep it advancing, and accepting that they can't sell support as cheaply as the "bug-fix only" proprietary vendor, or stop doing R&D themselves, so that they can be cost-competitive. Of course the disadvantage of this approach is that the product quickly falls behind proprietary offerings....
This is not going to be an easy battle for Redhat. I suspect they are going to have to find a new business model if they are to survive.
I couldn't agree more. I work in DRM, and one of my "duties" is to try and reverse engineer competitors' products to say what makes them tick, see what tricks they have used to make hackers' lives difficult etc etc etc. Most people have never tried to reverse engineer an encryption scheme. I have. I promise you that obscurity makes everyone hacker's life miserable.
To give an example - if you hand me some unobfuscated code in native binary, I will have retrieved the keys used to decrypt in less than a week. If you put some of your code in a popular VM (VMs being a popular obfuscation technique) such as Java, I have a whole series of tools freely available to me, and it won't take long to reverse engineer that either (in fact Java is easier than native byte-code). If you use a proprietary VM such as OpenTV, you're going to slow me down quite a bit. Dissassemblers/debuggers don't exist, and even the documentation for the bytecodes used by the VM are difficult to track down. To reverse engineer efficiently, you are obliged to start by writing your own debugger - and depending on your success in tracking down documentation, these may mean starting by reverse engineering the entire virtual machine. With a product like OpenTV, you can cheat a little by writing your own programs and compiling them with the easily available compilers. This makes the reverse engineering a bit simpler.
And then there is the all time pain in the butt, the custom-rolled virtual machine, designed to work in ways not normally seen in virtual machines, using screwed up addressing schemes, real-time decryption of programs etc etc etc. Worse, you have no tools, not even the compiler/assembler that goes with it. It's the ultimate security by obscurity. Your only attack is to reverse engineer the virtual machine. Worse, if the company has decided to obfuscate the virtual machine itself by another technique, you are in a world of hurt. Picking out the decrypt keys, or even just identifying the encryption algorithm used, is next to impossible. You're going to spend a good chunk of your life trying to sort this baby out.
Encryption is only as good as the security of the keys. And the keys are only as secure as the quality of obfuscation used to hide them. In other words, in most computer environments, the security _is_ the obscurity.
What. A. Load. Of. Rubbish.
As an Australian living in Paris, I just took the opportunity of doing a quick straw poll of friends/coleagues to find out what they thought was the hardest English accent to understand. Stand-out winners were the Irish, with the Scottish accent following in as an easy second. Strine ('Australian' said with an Aussie accent if you can't figure out where it comes from....) follows way back with (evidently) Kiwis, South Africans, and all the other funny English accents (brogue, cockney etc etc etc).
Just to finish off, when querying them about speaking English with Indians, most consider the Indian accent to be sufficiently bad that communications are all but impossible.
What fascinates me by your unbelievably uninformative post is that apparently you don't even know many (any?) Australians, having to rely on an anecdote from a former co-worker. Good Grief!
How about posting about a subject that you know something about?
Wait, if that's true (I note that you posted as an AC...), I just had a horrible thought. We have DRM on the iTunes episodes because we are told that this stops pirating, so people pay for the episode instead. The networks tell us this is a good thing, because it means more money to pay for more shows = more content for us. But now we are being told that the money doesn't go back to the creative talent, ie presumably it goes into the oversized pockets of company execs/shareholders. Come again?!?!
/.ers that actually believes DRM to be a reasonable idea. I write software for a living, and don't like the idea that others can just take my products that I have worked hard on without me getting anything in return. I even do DRM for a living just at the moment! But still, DRM is ONLY justifiable if the money made means more content (better content!) is produced.
Please note, I am one of the rare
And you of course have no idea what you are talking about.
The latest version of NeoOffice is quite simply the best Office software available on a Mac, free or otherwise. I've even got my father to install it and he now refuses to use MS Office.